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Post crash Air2s Saga Continues—gimbel

Mid-AtlanticDroneServices

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Some of you may been following my post crash saga after a test flight with a start RC battery mod. Long story short, I had a very hard belly landing and sudden loss of altitude. The only damage was a very slightly bent left landing gear leg. That, and the auxiliary light no longer worked. I did some recalibration and finally was able to adjust the aux light contacts. I thought I was at 100%.

Well, something is obviously wrong with the Gimbel. I need to recalibrate the IMU frequently, the gimbel sometimes shakes, gets stuck, overloads, etc. I can always get it recalibrated and it operates normally in flight. It doesn’t appear damaged in any way and moves freely. What’s weird is that it’s not just overloads or stock messages. When the drone boots up, it is often pointing the wrong direction, flips around, clicks, etc. I was wondering if anyone has experience with this kind of thing and whether or not folks think I may have to replace the entire Gimbel. I’m not looking to spend half the cost of the drone if I can avoid it.
 
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Solved! See below....

I kept thinking it was a motor or gear issue, or even a ribbon cable/other electronic failure. I then read about how dust and debris are brutal for the gimbal. So, I bought some compressed air and figured I'd try that. Same issue. Everything would be fine, I'd fly around and then the gimbal would get stuck in a rotated position (see photo...right edge up, left edge down on axis).

After yet more investigation, I realized the problem was much simpler. My hard landing has ever so slightly bent the mount back into the drone where it connects to camera bracket rotation axis (see photo 2). This allowed the edge of the camera bracket to over-rotate and make contact with the mount/get stuck (see green highlight photo 1). I considered a number of options. What ended up working was carefully bend it back into position. I also applied a very small amount of WD-40 near where it made contact. This did it! Took a test flight with absolutely no issues, including when I rapidly changed direction, causing maximum rotation.

Hope this helps others who have encountered something similar. I'm now back to 100% and ready to get into the flight logs/testing to see what happened with the apparent loss of battery power that resulted in the original crash.
 

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